Populist Expressions and Fantastic Times
They say nothing ever truly disappears from the internet, in the age of Google caches and the Wayback Machine, and they’re probably right.
Dubya once famously said “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier - just so long as I’m the dictator”, a sentiment that I’m sure has been echoed in the hearts of lawyers the world over since time immemorial. (If lawyers actually have hearts, that is.) Thankfully for the American people, Dubya isn’t a dictator. Nor are unprofessional members of the bar endowed with uncheckable power.
In a way, lawyers are like wizards; they dress in foolish clothes, and affect foolish mannerisms, and set great store by tradition. More significantly, their egos know no bounds, and they believe that reality is malleable under the force of their Will. While there are doubtless forces at work that mankind can’t understand, at the end of the day, it’s the lawyers who come crawling out of their caves, unable to bear the sun, while the wizards have been busy actually making things happen.
Incidentally, if you’ve arrived from Cryptome, today would be a great day to donate a couple bucks to John, by way of saying thanks for all the hard work he’s put into that site over the years. It’s not tax-deductible, but, hey, you can’t have everything.
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Someone famously said that “the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Have you considered re-posting elsewhere, say on a server in another country?
Best of luck to you.
B
Thanks for the comment.
I’ve considered going overseas, but have no doubt the humourless trolls, to continue the fantasy analogy, are thick-witted enough to proceed to threaten even the Elves of Holland, the Dwarves of Germany… and finding people brave enough to shrug off ever-escalating threats from trolls (or lawyers) is not easy work. That the trolls cannot (usually) throw boulders that far matters less to most hosts than that the trolls are threatening to do so.
With luck, Cryptome’s upstream will be less easily intimidated by threats of injunctions and lawsuits in federal court. Mine stuck it out for a while, but $5 a month only buys so much defense of the First Amemdment, even after a couple years’ patronage.